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Yep. Exactly this. If you get a laptop that a GNOME developer uses, chances are you’ll run into maybe two issues a year. But try to get GNOME to run on two 4K d

Yep. Exactly this. If you get a laptop that a GNOME developer uses, chances are you’ll run into maybe two issues a year. But try to get GNOME to run on two 4K displays and an RTX. But here’s the thing. Linux has won. Desktop is a dying market. Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone and in the data center, which is where it counts. The DE has gotten much better transitively from all the work that’s gone into those other use cases. But we still have a gamer market that is incredibly proprietary holding up the middle finger to those of us who think proprietary drivers and codecs are evil relics of a less open world. If you really want to see Linux on the DE, boycott NVIDIA, or write them a letter.

philliphaydon 8y ago
> If you really want to see Linux on the DE, boycott NVIDIA, or write them a letter. I was watching a video on youtube (can't find it now) about gaming on Linux, and it suggested to update the PPA and install the latest drivers. (this was after I refreshed my desktop to be Ubuntu Budgie) So I did that, installed latest NVidia Drivers. Tried out some steam games, and went to bed. Next day I couldn't boot into the desktop, got stuck in a loop, couldn't remove the drivers and get into desktop at all. It completely bunged my computer. Apparently alot of people had similar issues.
- godelski 8y ago
  This is literally my only (big) complaint about Linux. Video drivers just SUCK. I have NEVER had a plug and play solution for display from my laptop. I do expect to be able to plug in an HDMI cable and be able to give a presentation. And I expect to be able to do this with an nvidia card. But they have always failed me and I don't understand why this problem still exists (I would actually be interested if someone knows).
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    It's an Nvidia problem. Nvidia's proprietary drivers suck and they're nasty to anybody who tries to develop open source drivers for their cards. AMD and Intel GPUs have been flawless plug-and-play for years now. AMD plays nice with linux developers and you should give them, not Nvidia, your money.
    - shrimp_emoji 8y ago
      I was surprised when I saw the newest Vega firmwares show up in my /lib/firmware/amdgpu/ with a kernel update only 6 days after the release of the last AMD GPU -- and on Manjaro, where updates are supposedly delayed a little. AMD touted "day one Linux support", which I don't know if they fulfilled, but they're certainly more committed to Linux than Nvidia. Unfortunately, Nvidia's so dominant (and rightly-so from a price-per-performance unit standpoint). Also, though: would someone on Ubuntu or a point release distro (which is the majority of Linux end users) have these new firmwares, ever, until they reinstalled to the next OS version? Since hardware driver support seems so tied to the kernel version, I would think not unless they manually updated the kernel (which, not only is that scary on a distro meant to run with a specific kernel but it's something they have to go out of their way to do), which also means they'd miss out on DE improvements and other hardware/protocol support by as much as a year or more, depending on their upgrade cadence. TL;DR: rolling release provides the best Windows-like experience, and an Arch-based distro that emphasizes usability and mitigation of updates that break the system is what best fills that niche, so Manjaro master race.
      - godelski 8y ago
        > Nvidia's so dominant And rightly so, like you said. That's why I can't take the other user's advice and just shell out money to AMD. And while I do love Manjaro, I still have this problem. In fact I get no detection of my HDMI port. When I had Ubuntu I could (sometimes) get it to display if I restarted the computer with the HDMI plugged in. I'm also not sure why the linux devs don't take this (or at least not that I've seen) as seriously. Linux is in such a good state now that it is easier to convert people. But this problem prevents A LOT of people from switching, and rightly so. As for the NVIDIA sucks and doesn't play nice. There needs to be a better argument than that. Like why? There's so many people developing on linux with their cards. They are dominant. Most gpu programmers use cuda and a significant amount of ML researchers are using linux boxes. It doesn't make sense (to me) to just say f you to all those developers. Nvidia doesn't have a motive to push people to Windows.
      - jay_kyburz 8y ago
        >Unfortunately, Nvidia's so dominant (and rightly-so from a price-per-performance unit standpoint). I'm not sure about the price-per-performance. I just bought a new system with a Vega 64, and if you take into consideration I could use FreeSync instead of paying an extra $200 for GSync in a monitor, it works out better.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > This is literally my only (big) complaint about Linux. Video drivers just SUCK. Not really. The problem is NVIDIA doesn't give a crap about good user experience. The AMDGPU driver is pretty good and open-source to boot.
  - smichel17 8y ago
    About a month ago, I bought an RX 580 [1] and it worked plug-and-play (zero setup) on Fedora and NixOS. On the Windows side of things, I needed to go to the AMD website and download drivers in order to get out of reduced resolution. [1] This one: https://newegg.com/products/N82E16814150794 https://newegg.com/products/N82E16814150794
- fyfy18 8y ago
  That's just Nvidia. I had the same in Windows two years ago. Windows update automatically installed the latest Nvidia drivers, and after a reboot the screen was black after logging in. I assumed something got messed up (because Windows) so reinstalled Windows. It worked fine for a couple of hours, then I rebooted and had the same thing. Apparently that version of the driver was buggy with my hardware (GTX 1070), so I had to go into safe mode, downgrade and stop Windows automatically upgrading it.
darkpuma 8y ago
> Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone What makes this such a victory? The fact that Android uses a Linux kernel is totally meaningless to the overwhelming majority of Android users. The bootloaders on their phones are almost always locked down and even if that weren't the case, if their kernels were swapped out with something BSD derived how many people would actually notice? What is the objective with promoting Linux? Adoption for the sake of adoption? Getting the Linux kernel onto the largest number of CPUs, just to make that number go higher and higher? Is pursuit of some number the real goal, or is the goal actually something to do with user empowerment and liberation/freedom? A billion tivoized smartphones with linux kernels certainly optimizes for that number of CPUs, but from a user liberation/freedom standpoint Linux/Android is virtually moot. That Android gives the user more freedom than iOS is completely incidental to what kernel it uses. Android could be a platform open to third party app stores and sideloading that ran on a BSD kernel or even something completely different. To the average Android user, their Android phone is actually less open than Microsoft Windows, which also allows third party 'app stores' (e.g. Steam) and 'sideloading' (so normalized on Windows that it doesn't even use a special term like that.) Whether a system will be open to third party developers without any gatekeeper is a matter of company politics, not something that's emergent from what kernel is chosen. So yeah, pop open the champagne. Linux won and I'm going to need a lot of champagne to enjoy this hollow victory.
- bluedino 8y ago
  People saying "Linux won" because of Android would never say "Java won" which is every bit as true.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    A large majority of Java developers wouldn't say "Java won" regarding Android, because it is in fact Google's J++, not compatible with a large amount of random packages out from Maven Central.
    - curt15 8y ago
      >Google's J++, not compatible with a large amount of random packages out from Maven Central. Google's implementation is derived from Apache Harmony. Is the same true for Apache Harmony?
ThrowawayR2 8y ago
> Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone... So what happens if/when Google switches to Fuchsia on their phones?
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  At this stage, I’d say I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t doubt that Google has the capacity, but replacing a kernel that works is fraught with peril, and it could very well be that Fuschia remains yet another Google research project.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I think the point is just that the Linux kernel is irrelevant to the Android operating environment. It could run on anything Google wants it to and may do so in the future.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Then check Android repo, they are actively adding Fuchsia support.
    - cageface 8y ago
      What does it mean to add Fuschia support to the Android repo?
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        Means to enable Android userspace to run on top of Zirkon instead of Linux.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    From what I've heard, Fuchsia is a "senior engineer retention project".
- megous 8y ago
  They can't. I mean they can on their phones. But that's a tiny percentage of the total Android HW. All the big SoC vendors would have to get on board and rewrite their milions of lines of their kernel code on top of Fuchsia. Android is also not just phones, but also on tablets, tv boxes, etc. This would just cause even more fragmentation in the Android ecosystem.
pjmlp 8y ago
Laptops and 2-1 devices are the future desktop, and Linux has hardly won there. Android might run on Linux kernel, but that is a minor detail to userspace, and might be on the roadmap to be replaced by Zirkon. So no, it wasn't won anything besides server room.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  > Laptops and 2-1 devices are the future desktop, and Linux has hardly won there. That is more due to how OEMs lock out non-windows OSes from running on their hardware. If users were given a choice, the "windows tax" alone would be enough to convince people to give linux a try, particularly in the low-end segment.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    iOS and Android are non-windows OSes.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      I'm sure you are aware that: * Android is technically linux, but typically smartphones are locked in. * All apple products are notoriously locked in.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        I'm sure you are aware that: - Linux is an implementation detail in Android, isn't exposed to userspace (not part of Java/NDK official APIs), Treble made it even less upstream like and who knows, it might even be replaced by Fuchsia's Zirkon - Apple products being locked in doesn't have anything to do with laptops and 2-1 devices being the future desktops
- r3bl 8y ago
  As someone who owns a 2-in-1 (Lenovo Yoga 900 series), it works almost perfectly out-of-the-box. Screen rotation, pen support, virtual keyboard, they're all there and get the job done. The only thing that doesn't happen out of the box is that my keyboard remains activated when I switch to tablet mode. I'm having way more issues with proper scaling on my 4K screen than I do with the 2-in-1 support.
Animats 8y ago
Desktop is a dying market. Actually, tablets are a dying market.[1] Laptops are a declining market. Fewer desktops are being sold, but they're lasting longer because there's no reason to replace them. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-forecast-for-tablets-laptops-and-desktop-pcs/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...
- rbanffy 8y ago
  So, as we move forward, all these desktops will end up having stable and mature support. Drivers are often lacking for bleeding edge components, but stuff that was released 3 or 5 years ago tends to be very solid unless it's something obscure nobody has ever seen.
  - Animats 8y ago
    Microsoft doesn't want you to have stable and mature support. They want you using the latest everything and paying for it each month. Microsoft pushed hard to force users to upgrade to Windows 10.[1] Even today, many enterprise users refuse to convert. They don't want Microsoft's new rent, rather than own, software. They don't want Microsoft looking into their machines. They don't want to store corporate data in Microsoft's cloud. But they will convert, like good sheep. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2016/01/22/resistance-is-futile-you-will-be-assimilated-into-windows-10/#3a776c34af39 https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2016/01/22/resistan...
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      Come to Linux. We have cake. And your 3 year old hardware probably will work a lot better than it does under Windows ;-)
      - Animats 8y ago
        I'm on Linux. Xorg crashes on every login, and the crash reporter crashes complaining the dump file is too short.
sl1ck731 8y ago
> and in the data center, which is where it counts. Do you have any stats on this? As far as I know Windows and Linux are very competitive on the server and depending on the analysis Windows comes ahead.
- fyfy18 8y ago
  At least on Azure, Linux is leading as the top OS: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/ I assume this is true for most other cloud providers. But that doesn't take into account all the companies running racks of Windows servers in their basements.
  - sl1ck731 8y ago
    From that url in September it was about half Linux "but sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." I'm not sure that is the win OP was looking for.
    - koffiezet 8y ago
      Keep in mind that this is Azure, the cloud provider with almost certainly the most Windows installs. They try to push all their existing corporate clients to the cloud, and from what I've seen in enterprise environments, they're very successful at that. I do not expect AWS or Google to have anywhere near Azure's numbers of Windows VM's deployed... I wouldn't be surprised it their hosted Windows VM's would be a rounding error compared to MS/Azure's install base.
coldtea 8y ago
>But here’s the thing. Linux has won. Desktop is a dying market. Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone and in the data center, which is where it counts. It "counts" for whom? It sure doesn't count for me as an end user who wants to run some bloody programs on my laptop. Also whether it's Linux or anything else on the phone it's totally irrelevant to the end users. The actual layers the users see are the Google stuff and the Google Java etc APIs. By porting these they could -- and will -- move Android to Fuchsia tomorrow and nobody will even notice. When we wanted Linux to "win" in the 90s it was the whole desktop Linux (or, if that was there at the time, a mobile phone Linux), complete with desktop environment, userland, etc. Not as a backend that might or might not be Linux for all the user's care.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  And even as backend it is irrelevant for the large majority of cloud/serveless users using managed languages. Amazon could rebuild AWS on top of hypervisors, BSD or what have you and none of those users would notice, unless they would be doing some native FFI.
  - ilovecaching 8y ago
    > Amazon could rebuild AWS on top of hypervisors Um, what? > BSD or what have you and none of those users would notice FaaS and CaaS doesn't negate that there is a kernel API you're interfacing with. It absolutely makes a difference. Claiming that kernels are completely interchangeable is extremely naive, but then again, your first statement about hypervisors is so absolutely, confusingly incorrect that it's difficult to take what you say seriously.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Or, you know, it was a slip or a bad syntax, and you took the least charitable interpretation possible ("so absolutely, confusingly incorrect") and then took that to further extremes "that it's difficult to take what you say seriously". >FaaS and CaaS doesn't negate that there is a kernel API you're interfacing with Only in as much that it can't itself be emulated...
sametmax 8y ago
> Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone and in the data center, which is where it counts. Since phones are completly locked down, and Linux is the symbol of freedom by software, I'm not sure of that. Besides, companies still needs desktops (or laptops) to work. Nobody is going to do accounting on Android or iOS. And I'm certainly not going to dev on something else than Ubuntu.

philliphaydon 8y ago

> If you really want to see Linux on the DE, boycott NVIDIA, or write them a letter. I was watching a video on youtube (can't find it now) about gaming on Linux, and it suggested to update the PPA and install the latest drivers. (this was after I refreshed my desktop to be Ubuntu Budgie) So I did that, installed latest NVidia Drivers. Tried out some steam games, and went to bed. Next day I couldn't boot into the desktop, got stuck in a loop, couldn't remove the drivers and get into desktop at all. It completely bunged my computer. Apparently alot of people had similar issues.

godelski 8y ago
This is literally my only (big) complaint about Linux. Video drivers just SUCK. I have NEVER had a plug and play solution for display from my laptop. I do expect to be able to plug in an HDMI cable and be able to give a presentation. And I expect to be able to do this with an nvidia card. But they have always failed me and I don't understand why this problem still exists (I would actually be interested if someone knows).
- darkpuma 8y ago
  It's an Nvidia problem. Nvidia's proprietary drivers suck and they're nasty to anybody who tries to develop open source drivers for their cards. AMD and Intel GPUs have been flawless plug-and-play for years now. AMD plays nice with linux developers and you should give them, not Nvidia, your money.
  - shrimp_emoji 8y ago
    I was surprised when I saw the newest Vega firmwares show up in my /lib/firmware/amdgpu/ with a kernel update only 6 days after the release of the last AMD GPU -- and on Manjaro, where updates are supposedly delayed a little. AMD touted "day one Linux support", which I don't know if they fulfilled, but they're certainly more committed to Linux than Nvidia. Unfortunately, Nvidia's so dominant (and rightly-so from a price-per-performance unit standpoint). Also, though: would someone on Ubuntu or a point release distro (which is the majority of Linux end users) have these new firmwares, ever, until they reinstalled to the next OS version? Since hardware driver support seems so tied to the kernel version, I would think not unless they manually updated the kernel (which, not only is that scary on a distro meant to run with a specific kernel but it's something they have to go out of their way to do), which also means they'd miss out on DE improvements and other hardware/protocol support by as much as a year or more, depending on their upgrade cadence. TL;DR: rolling release provides the best Windows-like experience, and an Arch-based distro that emphasizes usability and mitigation of updates that break the system is what best fills that niche, so Manjaro master race.
    - godelski 8y ago
      > Nvidia's so dominant And rightly so, like you said. That's why I can't take the other user's advice and just shell out money to AMD. And while I do love Manjaro, I still have this problem. In fact I get no detection of my HDMI port. When I had Ubuntu I could (sometimes) get it to display if I restarted the computer with the HDMI plugged in. I'm also not sure why the linux devs don't take this (or at least not that I've seen) as seriously. Linux is in such a good state now that it is easier to convert people. But this problem prevents A LOT of people from switching, and rightly so. As for the NVIDIA sucks and doesn't play nice. There needs to be a better argument than that. Like why? There's so many people developing on linux with their cards. They are dominant. Most gpu programmers use cuda and a significant amount of ML researchers are using linux boxes. It doesn't make sense (to me) to just say f you to all those developers. Nvidia doesn't have a motive to push people to Windows.
    - jay_kyburz 8y ago
      >Unfortunately, Nvidia's so dominant (and rightly-so from a price-per-performance unit standpoint). I'm not sure about the price-per-performance. I just bought a new system with a Vega 64, and if you take into consideration I could use FreeSync instead of paying an extra $200 for GSync in a monitor, it works out better.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > This is literally my only (big) complaint about Linux. Video drivers just SUCK. Not really. The problem is NVIDIA doesn't give a crap about good user experience. The AMDGPU driver is pretty good and open-source to boot.
- smichel17 8y ago
  About a month ago, I bought an RX 580 [1] and it worked plug-and-play (zero setup) on Fedora and NixOS. On the Windows side of things, I needed to go to the AMD website and download drivers in order to get out of reduced resolution. [1] This one: https://newegg.com/products/N82E16814150794 https://newegg.com/products/N82E16814150794
fyfy18 8y ago
That's just Nvidia. I had the same in Windows two years ago. Windows update automatically installed the latest Nvidia drivers, and after a reboot the screen was black after logging in. I assumed something got messed up (because Windows) so reinstalled Windows. It worked fine for a couple of hours, then I rebooted and had the same thing. Apparently that version of the driver was buggy with my hardware (GTX 1070), so I had to go into safe mode, downgrade and stop Windows automatically upgrading it.

darkpuma 8y ago

> Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone What makes this such a victory? The fact that Android uses a Linux kernel is totally meaningless to the overwhelming majority of Android users. The bootloaders on their phones are almost always locked down and even if that weren't the case, if their kernels were swapped out with something BSD derived how many people would actually notice? What is the objective with promoting Linux? Adoption for the sake of adoption? Getting the Linux kernel onto the largest number of CPUs, just to make that number go higher and higher? Is pursuit of some number the real goal, or is the goal actually something to do with user empowerment and liberation/freedom? A billion tivoized smartphones with linux kernels certainly optimizes for that number of CPUs, but from a user liberation/freedom standpoint Linux/Android is virtually moot. That Android gives the user more freedom than iOS is completely incidental to what kernel it uses. Android could be a platform open to third party app stores and sideloading that ran on a BSD kernel or even something completely different. To the average Android user, their Android phone is actually less open than Microsoft Windows, which also allows third party 'app stores' (e.g. Steam) and 'sideloading' (so normalized on Windows that it doesn't even use a special term like that.) Whether a system will be open to third party developers without any gatekeeper is a matter of company politics, not something that's emergent from what kernel is chosen. So yeah, pop open the champagne. Linux won and I'm going to need a lot of champagne to enjoy this hollow victory.

bluedino 8y ago
People saying "Linux won" because of Android would never say "Java won" which is every bit as true.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  A large majority of Java developers wouldn't say "Java won" regarding Android, because it is in fact Google's J++, not compatible with a large amount of random packages out from Maven Central.
  - curt15 8y ago
    >Google's J++, not compatible with a large amount of random packages out from Maven Central. Google's implementation is derived from Apache Harmony. Is the same true for Apache Harmony?

ThrowawayR2 8y ago

> Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone... So what happens if/when Google switches to Fuchsia on their phones?

ilovecaching 8y ago
At this stage, I’d say I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t doubt that Google has the capacity, but replacing a kernel that works is fraught with peril, and it could very well be that Fuschia remains yet another Google research project.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I think the point is just that the Linux kernel is irrelevant to the Android operating environment. It could run on anything Google wants it to and may do so in the future.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Then check Android repo, they are actively adding Fuchsia support.
  - cageface 8y ago
    What does it mean to add Fuschia support to the Android repo?
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Means to enable Android userspace to run on top of Zirkon instead of Linux.
- vetinari 8y ago
  From what I've heard, Fuchsia is a "senior engineer retention project".
megous 8y ago
They can't. I mean they can on their phones. But that's a tiny percentage of the total Android HW. All the big SoC vendors would have to get on board and rewrite their milions of lines of their kernel code on top of Fuchsia. Android is also not just phones, but also on tablets, tv boxes, etc. This would just cause even more fragmentation in the Android ecosystem.

pjmlp 8y ago

Laptops and 2-1 devices are the future desktop, and Linux has hardly won there. Android might run on Linux kernel, but that is a minor detail to userspace, and might be on the roadmap to be replaced by Zirkon. So no, it wasn't won anything besides server room.

geezerjay 8y ago
> Laptops and 2-1 devices are the future desktop, and Linux has hardly won there. That is more due to how OEMs lock out non-windows OSes from running on their hardware. If users were given a choice, the "windows tax" alone would be enough to convince people to give linux a try, particularly in the low-end segment.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  iOS and Android are non-windows OSes.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    I'm sure you are aware that: * Android is technically linux, but typically smartphones are locked in. * All apple products are notoriously locked in.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      I'm sure you are aware that: - Linux is an implementation detail in Android, isn't exposed to userspace (not part of Java/NDK official APIs), Treble made it even less upstream like and who knows, it might even be replaced by Fuchsia's Zirkon - Apple products being locked in doesn't have anything to do with laptops and 2-1 devices being the future desktops
r3bl 8y ago
As someone who owns a 2-in-1 (Lenovo Yoga 900 series), it works almost perfectly out-of-the-box. Screen rotation, pen support, virtual keyboard, they're all there and get the job done. The only thing that doesn't happen out of the box is that my keyboard remains activated when I switch to tablet mode. I'm having way more issues with proper scaling on my 4K screen than I do with the 2-in-1 support.

Animats 8y ago

Desktop is a dying market. Actually, tablets are a dying market.[1] Laptops are a declining market. Fewer desktops are being sold, but they're lasting longer because there's no reason to replace them. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-forecast-for-tablets-laptops-and-desktop-pcs/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

rbanffy 8y ago
So, as we move forward, all these desktops will end up having stable and mature support. Drivers are often lacking for bleeding edge components, but stuff that was released 3 or 5 years ago tends to be very solid unless it's something obscure nobody has ever seen.
- Animats 8y ago
  Microsoft doesn't want you to have stable and mature support. They want you using the latest everything and paying for it each month. Microsoft pushed hard to force users to upgrade to Windows 10.[1] Even today, many enterprise users refuse to convert. They don't want Microsoft's new rent, rather than own, software. They don't want Microsoft looking into their machines. They don't want to store corporate data in Microsoft's cloud. But they will convert, like good sheep. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2016/01/22/resistance-is-futile-you-will-be-assimilated-into-windows-10/#3a776c34af39 https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2016/01/22/resistan...
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    Come to Linux. We have cake. And your 3 year old hardware probably will work a lot better than it does under Windows ;-)
    - Animats 8y ago
      I'm on Linux. Xorg crashes on every login, and the crash reporter crashes complaining the dump file is too short.

sl1ck731 8y ago

> and in the data center, which is where it counts. Do you have any stats on this? As far as I know Windows and Linux are very competitive on the server and depending on the analysis Windows comes ahead.

fyfy18 8y ago
At least on Azure, Linux is leading as the top OS: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/ I assume this is true for most other cloud providers. But that doesn't take into account all the companies running racks of Windows servers in their basements.
- sl1ck731 8y ago
  From that url in September it was about half Linux "but sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." I'm not sure that is the win OP was looking for.
  - koffiezet 8y ago
    Keep in mind that this is Azure, the cloud provider with almost certainly the most Windows installs. They try to push all their existing corporate clients to the cloud, and from what I've seen in enterprise environments, they're very successful at that. I do not expect AWS or Google to have anywhere near Azure's numbers of Windows VM's deployed... I wouldn't be surprised it their hosted Windows VM's would be a rounding error compared to MS/Azure's install base.

coldtea 8y ago

>But here’s the thing. Linux has won. Desktop is a dying market. Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone and in the data center, which is where it counts. It "counts" for whom? It sure doesn't count for me as an end user who wants to run some bloody programs on my laptop. Also whether it's Linux or anything else on the phone it's totally irrelevant to the end users. The actual layers the users see are the Google stuff and the Google Java etc APIs. By porting these they could -- and will -- move Android to Fuchsia tomorrow and nobody will even notice. When we wanted Linux to "win" in the 90s it was the whole desktop Linux (or, if that was there at the time, a mobile phone Linux), complete with desktop environment, userland, etc. Not as a backend that might or might not be Linux for all the user's care.

pjmlp 8y ago
And even as backend it is irrelevant for the large majority of cloud/serveless users using managed languages. Amazon could rebuild AWS on top of hypervisors, BSD or what have you and none of those users would notice, unless they would be doing some native FFI.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  > Amazon could rebuild AWS on top of hypervisors Um, what? > BSD or what have you and none of those users would notice FaaS and CaaS doesn't negate that there is a kernel API you're interfacing with. It absolutely makes a difference. Claiming that kernels are completely interchangeable is extremely naive, but then again, your first statement about hypervisors is so absolutely, confusingly incorrect that it's difficult to take what you say seriously.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Or, you know, it was a slip or a bad syntax, and you took the least charitable interpretation possible ("so absolutely, confusingly incorrect") and then took that to further extremes "that it's difficult to take what you say seriously". >FaaS and CaaS doesn't negate that there is a kernel API you're interfacing with Only in as much that it can't itself be emulated...

sametmax 8y ago

> Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone and in the data center, which is where it counts. Since phones are completly locked down, and Linux is the symbol of freedom by software, I'm not sure of that. Besides, companies still needs desktops (or laptops) to work. Nobody is going to do accounting on Android or iOS. And I'm certainly not going to dev on something else than Ubuntu.